Sunday, August 9, 2009

In the 1980s video cassette technology made it possible for “mobile cinema” operators in Ghana to travel from town to town and village to village creating temporary cinemas. The touring film group would create a theatre by hooking up a TV and VCR onto a portable generator and playing the films for the people to see.

In order to promote these showings, artists were hired to paint large posters of the films (usually on used canvas flour sacks). The artists were given the artistic freedom to paint the posters as they desired - often adding elements that weren’t in the actual films, or without even having seen the movies. When the posters were finished they were rolled up and taken on the road (note the heavy damages). The “mobile cinema” began to decline in the mid-nineties due to greater availability of television and video; as a result the painted film posters were substituted for less interesting/artistic posters produced on photocopied paper.

The artistic freedom that these artists were given allowed for the creation of some very interesting and sometimes bizarre posters that, as screenwriter Walter Hill wrote, were quite often “more interesting than the films.”

Most of these posters come from the book Extreme Canvas: Movie Poster Paintings from Ghana that Will from A Journey Around My Skull linked me to. The rest were found online at the below links.

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Interesting. Most of these seem to be from self-taught artists, but some seem to be from people with some formal artistic education. Take, for instance, the cubist-inspired Terminator poster or the House Party one (the technique and the visual design are fairly sophisticated for what was probably meant to be disposable art). The video guys probably hired some starving art students.

anybody else get really familiar feelings from some of the images in the posters? I know some like Deadly Prey are copied directly from the original poster (which makes the tiny head even stranger) but the dog/something in Killer Toys gave me serious vibes of something else and I think it reminded me of the cow in Guernica... and when I looked up Guernica just now the random hand gripping a pistol in the Terminat<3r poster seems similar but I might be pushing it there. Also a lot of things reminded me of Japanese/Chinese art, the completely random fish in Spy Who Love Me and I forget if it was Children of the Corn or one of the other ones has an old lady that I think is either channeling the Wizard of Oz or some kind of Yama-uba creature. And the one monster biting down on an arm reminded me of a Tengu. And the lady/monster with bugs in her hair reminds me of a demonic shampoo ad lol. Not seriously but it does seem like it was traced (modified to say the least)from some photograph. I'm really curious about the ratio of original/reappropriated images from paintings/posters/advertising. It doesn't help that I have no idea what somebody from Ghana would be exposed to during that time period - I'm surprised half those movies were successful enough that they were being shown in the first place (what the hell is Killer Toys anyway?)

The Cujo poster creeps me out about 100 times worse than any of the others. Anybody else think his eyes look way too human/intelligent? And the shape reminds me of a man sitting or standing, like the torso doesn't correspond to the rest of the figure. (I mean aside from the bottom belonging to a rottweiler) It almost reminds me of that Francis Bacon painting where it suggests 4 or 5 different figures and then disguised as a cute basset hound on top of everything else. The one detailed eye when the other is just this blot creeps me out too, I don't know if it's an all-seeing eye feel or what. My last theory was it it doesn't even look like a living breathing dog, it looks like a man /wearing/ a dog or some kind of freaky Ed Gein thing like that. Again the uh lady reminds me of some mutant geisha. A lot of the posters in general have this feel like limbs don't correspond to bodies in a way that should seem unskilled but feels too purposeful at the same time. I don't think it would be half as scary if it were fully realistic or cartoonish. My mind keeps switching between thinking it's just a bad painting and everything was done the exact way they intended. Some of the posters come off as way more morbid than the others so maybe it's just one artist where I'm seeing that. (The Evil Dead poster for example doesn't really scare me at all, that creature in the corner is really strange but for some reason bizarre != scary in that case)

sorry if I got some of the images/posters they're from wrong I'm too squeamish and immediately scrolled to the bottom of the page

has anybody ever tracked down the artists who did these? and how many unique artists are there between the posters shown? I'm really curious what the heck they're like, if this is their sellout commercial art what in the world would their original art look like

sorry if this read like a book report but these paintings are just such an enigma, I can't even start to figure them out or if there's even anything to figure out in the first place. There's another website with more Ghanese posters like these, some were more on the pulpy side of things but one was for The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin where he's painted in a style like these. So then for a while I thought oh god what if everything in these posters has some embedded/double meaning kind of like these http://wellmedicated.com/inspiration/50-incredible-film-posters-from-poland/

um in closing I like all the ad-bots "very impressive keep up the good work"

I have real paintings like these from Ghana. Commissioned some when I went to visit my mom over there. They're simply fabulous! You can take any pic to them and they will recreate it - truly talented artists!